The West Virginia Federation of Democratic Women sound off on a variety of relevant topics.

Monday, April 3, 2017

Senator, Answer the Senator's Question

Senate Republicans Pass Stealth Increase in Property Taxes

They Let Counties Take
The Heat

Senate Republicans narrowly passed SB 609,
which would automatically raise every county’s property tax levy to the
statutory maximum, and cut the state school aid funding by the amount
raised.

How much will your county lose?

The move is a shell game to plug the state’s budget deficit
— to the tune of $79.3 million - by forcing local county boards of
education take the heat for the huge tax increase. The bill gives
counties the option to roll back the levy, but doing so would not restore the state
cuts, leaving mammoth holes in local county and BOE budgets.

The measure
narrowly passed, 17-16. How did your Senator vote?

“We’re voting an 18 percent increase on taxes,” said Senator Robert Plymale, D-Wayne. “I just want to make sure we understand we are voting
on a tax increase in this bill.”

Republican supporters struggled to admit that the bill was a
tax increase. Asked by Sen. John Unger, D-Berkeley, if the bill increased
taxes, Sen. Ryan Ferns, R-Ohio, said, “I think it does to the extent that the
board of education doesn’t opt to lower that rate down.”

“The money raised by the school levy stays, every dollar,
with the county board of education,” insisted Sen. Charles Trump, R-Morgan. “It
does affect, in an inverse way, the amount of money that the school aid formula
suggests that we provide to school boards.” The increase in property taxes will fall
hardest on the shoulders of our senior citizens and lower income families.

Friday, March 31, 2017

A Trifecta of Micromanaging West Virginia Schools

West Virginia State Senate Debate of Senate Bill 18 on March 29th

SB 18 gives the legislature final say on curriculum and testing decisions made for West Virginia schools. Politicians don't need to be making those decisions, educators do. We need to let teachers teach.

Tuesday, March 28, 2017

After Judiciary Committee testimony highlighted water quality concerns,
bill
was voted out of committee with no opportunity for further debate or
amendments.

West Virginia State Capitol

March 23, 2017

Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee used a rare procedural maneuver to end debate they didn't like on House Bill 2506, the “Cancer Creek" bill. After about
two hours of testimony, mostly from opponents of the bill, Senator Randy Smith,
Republican-Tucker, moved to approve the bill, which ended debate and eliminated the
potential for committee members to amend the legislation.

The bill changes the criteria used to set water permit limits for
pollutants from the current 7Q10 — which sets the standard based on the
lowest seven-day consecutive flow of a stream — to solely the “harmonic
mean” standard, which calculates the average flow of a stream.

All surrounding states use a combination of
“7Q10” or a similar low flow criteria for non-carcinogen pollution and
“harmonic flow” for carcinogens.Concerned citizens testifying about the bill pointed out this could lead to lowering the state’s
water quality standards to dangerous levels, especially during drought
conditions when water flows are low.

The motion to vote on the bill passed eight to six. The motion to actually send the bill to the floor passed 10 to 5.

UPDATE March 27: Democrats tried to amend the bill on 2nd reading from the floor. All amendments were rejected with votes going along Party lines: http://www.legis.state.wv.us/legisdocs/2017/RS/votes/senate/03-27-0230.pdfFollow WV Democrats:f: WV Senate Democratst: @wvsenatedems

Thursday, September 15, 2016

What is causing our trade deficits?

By Grace Norton

Legislative Chair

Both Bernie Sanders and Donald
Trump are blaming “trade deals” for the loss of manufacturing jobs in the
United States that so many of their supporters see as the root cause of their
being “left behind” because wages have stagnated or even declined for what used
to be the middle class. Bernie Sanders
sees himself as some sort of visionary for casting votes against NAFTA and
subsequent trade agreements. Trump
argues that American negotiators were simply incompetent and allowed themselves
to be bested by the Chinese and others.
Both Sanders and Trump are dead
wrong.

The real causes of the economic
situation we now have are quite different from what those candidates blame.
They began decades before any of the trade agreements now being blamed were even
contemplated. One of the most important
of the actual causes dates from the 1950's and three others date from the late
1960's. Each of these has had more of
an impact on the restructuring of the American economy and the changes in
people’s relative economic status than
all of the trade agreements combined.

At the close of World War II, the
United States had the only major industrial economy that had not been
absolutely devastated by the war. Our
wartime industries had ramped up to produce everything needed to win the war,
often by stopping production of hundreds of kinds of consumer goods. When the war ended, we had a huge backlog of
domestic demand as well as a huge demand from abroad for materials to re-build
the economies of war-torn nations. We
were running three shifts a day getting every ounce of production we could get
out of factories built before and during the war. Meanwhile,
the Europeans and Japanese were busy building new, more efficient
industrial facilities to replace those destroyed by war; and the Third World was starting to actually
develop industrial economies instead of merely producing raw materials. The entry of new producers meant that there
was soon to be too much production capacity for some products, among them
steel. Much of the new production came
from factories that were more efficient than the American factories and paid
their workers less. Their products could
be sold for less than American-made products.
For awhile, the non-European producers could not match the quality of
American-made products, but they soon learned how to make products of
competitive quality.

The second of the causes was the
collapse of attempts to create a system of monetary management among the major
economic nations of the world. The
Brettotn-Woods system was created in the later
years of World War II to try to ensure that there would be a system of
financial rules and institutions that would facilitate fair trade and other
international relations. Parties included
the U. S., western European nations, China, Australia, and, after the war
ended, Germany and Japan.
The idea was to tie the value of these major currencies to an agreed
upon price of gold bullion ($35 per ounce) with the United States as guarantor
of what was necessary to maintain flexibility and liquidity to faciltate trade
and economic development. The fatal
flaw of Bretton-Woods was the impossibility of maintaining a stable price of
gold on the open bullion market. It was
possible to accumulate dollars, trade 35 paper dollars for an ounce of gold,
then sell that gold on the bullion market for much more than $35 an ounce. Other problems with Bretton-Woods created
recessionary pressures within the U. S. economy that both the Kennedy and
Johnson administrations tried, without much success, to address. In 1971, President Nixon unilaterally took
the United States out of the system, allowing the American dollar to “float”
against the value of other currencies of the world. Absent the United States’ participation, the
Bretton-Woods system could not function.
But in a condition of “floating”
currencies, the relative strength of one currency against another affects the
relative price of goods to consumers. A
strong U. S. dollar causes American goods to be quite expensive when they are
sold in countries with relatively weaker dollars. Conversely, goods made in countries with weak
dollars should cost less when sold in the U. S., although the benefits of any
lower cost may well go entirely to the importer rather than to the actual
consumer.

The third major problem is an
outgrowth of the second. Some nations
engage in currency manipulation to gain trade advantages. Currency manipulation involves a government
buying or selling its own currency in order to change the exchange rate of its
currency-what people get when they convert, for example, dollars into
Euros. Artificially changing the
exchange rate drive the currency’s value away from the equilibrium that would
have been achieved by market forces alone.
The object of manipulation is to be unfair to trading
partners. In a lot of ways, currency
manipulation is to business what point-shaving is to sports. For some time now, China and some other
nations have believed that it is in their own national interest to manipulate
currency to make their goods cheaper than comparable items made in other
countries so that trading partners will buy more from them. For example, the Chinese government thinks
this will stimulate demand for goods made in China and result in more jobs for
their workers and more profits for their industries. Currency manipulation is actually independent
of the terms of trade agreements, but it affects the results of trade agreements to the nations
invovled. To continue the analogy to
sports, point-shaving will affect a team’s win/loss record and possibly enrich team owners independently of
league rules, the schedules agreed to by the teams, etc. The point-shaving effects can spill over into such things as
where teams stand in the draft choices, player salaries, etc. Several well-designed and reputable studies
have concluded that currency manipulation alone has cost the United States 5.8
million jobs and Canada millions more.

The third of the 1960's era problems
was a conscious decision by the Nixon administration to actually facilitate the
transfer of manufaturing jobs to low-wage areas. One Nixon-era grand idea was what has come to
be known as “trickle-down economics,” the idea that if we make it possible for
businesses to maximize profits, they will create more jobs and the wealth will
funnel down to ordinary workers. One
Secretary of Defense proclaimed that
“whatever was good for General Motors was good for the country.” The other grand idea of the Nixon-era
economic advisors, which actually worked to some extent against the other big
idea, was to take advantage of the
advances in technology by fostering the growth of high-technology jobs in the United States
while moving the low-skilled production jobs to lower-wage countries and
lower-wage states so that the workers there could afford to buy more
American-made products. Simultaneously,
there was a determined effort to hold down
wages for American workers because labor costs are among the easiest costs to
control. Wages had increased
dramatically after World War II because of union activity in the post-war years
to make up for wage freezes during the war.
The push for “right-to-work” laws is an on-going part of efforts to hold
down wages. What we need to realize is
that manufacturing jobs began to be eliminated on a large scale in 1970, when
Nixon was president--not after the passage of NAFTA in 1994. Between 1970 and 1974, each of the industrial states in the northeastern
part of the country lost hundreds of
businesses each year–many to southern states. Wages for American workers
began to stagnate in 1970, a quarter of a century before the passage of NAFTA.

What has happened to the United
States economy since 1970 has also happened to some extent in other First World
nations. Germany fared better than most
because it took steps to make it expensive for companies to move out of the
country–for example, requiring them to fully fund pensions for workers who would
be out of jobs, requiring them to repay communities for infrastructure and
other expenditutes made for the benefit of the business but otherwise
unnecesary to the community. Faced with
large up-front costs to make moving the company possible, most decided to stay
put. European nations that bought into
austerity as the means to recover from the effects of the world-wide economic
chaos of the 2008-10 have not fared nearly as well as the U. S., which took a
stimulus approach. Japan is among the
Asian nations that is having problems similar to our own. China, too, is having major problems
now. Trump, at least, woud hae people
believe that all of these nations are “beating” the United States in everything
having to do with manufacturing and trade–but it simply is not true.

The spate of so-called “religious
freedom” and “religious freedom restoration” laws being passed by a number of
state legislatures are, in fact, nothing more than discrimination-promotion
legislation. The language of the bills
purports either to prohit government
from interfering with individuals’ religious freedom or else to “restore”
religious freedoms allegedly being interfered with by government actions. The first purpose is unnecessary because the
First Amendment of the Constitution already prohibits government interference
with freedom of religion throughout the United States and its territories. The second purpose presumes that substantial
interference with religion actually exists.
Some factual basis is supposed to
be established credibly by that section of legisltion known as
“legislative purpose.” These laws fail
the credible basis test.

What the Constitution protects in
the First Amndment is, first,
unrestricted freedom to believe something (e.g., that there is a God,
that the earth was created in seven days, etc.)
There is no constitutional requirement that the belief be rational, that
it conform to fact established by legitimate evidence, or that it conform to
social norms. The First Amendment also
protects the “free exercise” of religion, but it does that on a somewhat
restricted basis. For example, a parent
may not require his child to handle poisonous snakes to prove the child’s faith. Nor must government permit someone to blow up
an abortion clinic no matter how strongly his religion opposes abortion, or gun
down a group of people no matter how strongly he believes in Islamic jihad. The free exercise of religion, particularly
outside the context of an actual religious ritual occurring in a place of
worship, ends at the point where it interferes with the fundamental rights of
others.

The bills that legislatures have
produced so far are, for the most part, vague and otherwise badly written. All of them appear to empower the employees
of governments and/or businesses to pick and choose what items on
their job descriptions they would perform and for what customers they would
perform them. All that appears to be
necessary to exempt an employee from doing part of his or her job is for the
employee to claim that he/she has a “sincerely held religious belief” that
doing some part of the job is immoral.
That is little short of utter insanity guaranted to subvert the purposes
for which any workplace exists.

Government agencies exist to serve
members of the public by providing some good or service. Governments license businesses to transfer goods and services it is lawful
to transfer from the company to customers legally entitled to purchase them and
able to pay for them. Governments and
businesses pay employees to facilitate the transfer of goods and servicess from
the agency or business to the customer.
When a government agency or a business hires someone to do a job, that
person is informed about what the job duties are; and, by accepting the job
(and the compensation), the person assumes an obligation to do what is on the
job description.

People who either create a business
or take a job knowing that they may not be able to perform its functions for each and every customer are behaving
unethically and/or immorally unless they informed the licensing body or the
employer up front about any and all impediments to performing as expected. An employer has a right not to hire someone
unwilling or unable to perform what the job requires. Historically, if some condition arises in which an employee feels he or she cannot,
in good conscience, do some aspect of the job or follow an order, the
expectation has been that the employee resign–not that the employer and
custormer have to put up with self-righteous non-performance. The burden should be–and historically has
been–on the employee to either do their job or resign from it.

Does anyone really
“sincerely believe” any of the following?

1. If your church disapproves of gay marriage, it
is immoral for you to serve pancakes to a same-sex couple.

2. It is an immoral act for you to
set a plate of pancakes on the table of a gay patron.

3. It is an immoral act for you to
talk to a gay patron to take his order for pancakes or process his payment for
his bill.

Since when are activities such as serving food in a
restaurant, selling wedding rings in a jewelry store, or recordng a certificate
of marriage in as clerk’s office either
a “religious belief” or an “exercise of religion? “Religious freedom” legislation tacitly
acepts the false premise that these ordinary job activities are one or the
other.

The truth is that these laws are
being passed to facilitate discrimination.
They have nothing to do with “freedom of religion” or its “free
exercise.”

Sunday, March 13, 2016

Yesterday was the last day of the Republican led 2016
Legislative Session, thank goodness.

While myself and the women of the West Virginia Federation of
Democratic Women are more than ready for it to be over, it’s heart breaking to try and take in
all that has unfolded.

We’ve been up against a Republican attack on West Virginia
workers and our families since they took the majorities in our State Senate and
House of Delegates. We’ve seen them cut
wages, gut jobs and benefits and pass careless legislation that puts our homes
and our rights at risk.

The selfishness of the Republican majorities is not
welcome here. Our mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, children and
seniors, and families and friends in our beautiful Mountain State deserve
better.

What the Republicans have done to our state and her people is unacceptable and
tremendously disrespectful of our livelihoods and our West Virginia values.

We have not been silent. Democrats have stood in solidarity to protect our families and friends. We may not have always
agreed 100%, but we have fought together.

Even though the session is over, we will not stop the fight
because all West Virginians are worth fighting for. You are worth fighting for. Our fight is just beginning,
we have an election in November and we cannot afford for you to stay home. We need your help.

Democrats are who West Virginia families can depend on. We’re
whom they can trust and we cannot let them down.

Join Democrats as we stand up for our friends and families in
West Virginia. Join us as we fight for their safety, their jobs, their
children’s education, the food on their tables and their health care.

Please join us today and work with us to turn West Virginia
blue in November, not for politics, but for people. Not only do we deserve
better, we deserve more.

We hope to never see this Republican attack on West Virginia
workers and families ever again, and we need your help so we don’t.